Many people automatically think that vegetarian diet is healthy. This is not entirely true. Although it’s a lot easier to maintain a healthy lifestyle on a vegetarian diet, the very assumption that your diet is healthy only because it’s vegetarian can bring problems.

Sometimes vegetarians can be very unhealthy either through laziness or lack of planning. If you assume that you can eat junk food as long as it’s vegetarian, you’ll find yourself with lots of health issues sooner or later. This is one of the reasons why some  do not last as vegetarians. Without proper planning a vegetarian diet can easily lead to things like obesity or nutrient deficiencies.

It’s a natural reaction for many recent vegetarians to replace high in fat and protein foods (e.g. meat) with starchy carbohydrates e.g. bread, pasta, potato. If you have a tendency to gain weight easily, it’s better to keep starchy carbs and sugars to a minimum and instead get more of veggies (except potato) especially greens, nuts, soy and wheat protein, fruit and dairy products. Try to eat as often as possible even 6 times a day. When you plan your snacks and are never hungry you have less temptation to resort to junk food.

If you’re new to a vegetarian diet try to learn more about nutrition and carefully think how you can replace your usual non-vegetarian foods with vegetarian alternatives. By doing it only once you’ll ensure that you’ll enjoy your new diet a lot more and will be a healthy vegetarian.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Food, Vegan, Vegetarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.